But the 'violence,' and the rest of it, was too palpable a lie. The deliverance came. Over the months which followed before I came to be imprisoned again, matron and young doctor gone--good plants flourish ill in such a soil as that--I wish to pass as lightly as possible. They would have chiefly to do with home matters which have no place in such a story as this, and only concern consciences to which I would have nothing to say. I have done with them--let them alone. The period of my freedom lasted ten months. I spent the time in aimless wandering from place to place--among the bathers of Trouville and the playgoers of Paris, in the hotels and streets of London--in a fashion which would make a story by itself, were this the place to set it down. The shock with which I had learned what had been done to me had shaken to the centre what nerve the 'treatment' had left me. Night after night I did nothing but dream, dream, dream of the asylum and its terrors. The warders, whose faces I knew so well, were always behind me; the antics of the madmen were re-acted with merciless fidelity. The sense of utter helplessness in the hands of mad-doctors, which the experience had left upon my mind, would leave me neither night nor day. A traveller's chance allusion in my hearing to 'Bedlam let loose,' or a whimsical song about 'Charenton' in a French vaudeville, would drive me out of the station or the theatre in helpless fear of I knew not what. If a gendarme accosted me at night in the streets, I shook all over in the expectation of being removed to a French asylum. If I saw an advertisement relating to an asylum in a casual newspaper, it was to lay it down in terror. There seemed to me but one power in the world--the power of the lunacy 'law.' Such is the confidence which our vaunted system, which professes to know no wrong without a remedy, could inspire in one who needed its protection so sorely as I. In one respect its might was certainly vindicated, for, abroad and at home, I thought that it could reach me anywhere. I kept these fears of mine as much as I could to myself; for to talk of them might be, under the circumstances of my life, to be shut up at once again. But it was a fearful trial. I was utterly cowed and frightened, and I was afraid to face anyone; for I thought I read in every face a knowledge of my story. Except by an occasional desperate effort, I could force myself to meet no one. But ill as I was then, and full of fancies, not one of the old friends who saw me imagined in me a trace of insanity. That I know. In Paris especially I found one old literary friend, to whose rooms--from that odd thing called sympathy, I suppose--I was able to go more often than anywhere else, though seldom enough, Heaven knows! I have often wondered since what are his real thoughts in the matter. In theatres and hotels, in streets and in cafés, seldom allowing myself to sleep more than one or two consecutive nights in the same place, from the fear of being 'taken,' and, when I did stay, afraid of going to my room and then of leaving it--I dreed this dreary weird chiefly alone. And by the odd irony of the whole thing, this was the time when I was indeed nearest to madness, and really required careful watching; not that of warders or of repression, be it understood, but of the affection which is unhappily not made to order. I had been called suicidal and homicidal when I was no danger to anybody. Now thoughts of suicide did indeed take shape and form in my mind. In that there was no madness, for the impulse which madness supplies to carry these wretched thoughts into effect failed me always, and so saved my life. Yet there was not a day at last when I did not leave the house with the intention--if I could only find the needed courage--of bringing this impossible existence to an end. I knew that I was not going to die; but I believed that, after the line of treatment so shamefully adopted once, to save trouble, there was little chance of escaping a second condemnation if I did not die. And the event proved me miserably right. Have I not cause to say that I have no special call to spare the susceptibilities of others? I have no respect left for Pickwickian feelings--none.